Ten months of running my agent from a black window, eight interfaces that almost worked, and the open source agentic IDE that ended the hunt this week.
Haven't given Orca a proper run yet, so I can't compare it fairly. What keeps me on bb is that my own agent can drive it from the CLI: spawn threads, steer them, read their output, while everything runs on my Mac Mini. That's the first thing I'd check in any alternative. If you try both, I'd love to hear how it goes.
Thanks for the response and all that you do; you are number one on Substack for me.
I stopped setting up Orca halfway through, just because it lacks the wiring for custom plugins like BB (I'll be keeping an eye on when it adds that), which just feels like an absolute requirement now after getting a taste for it. Among other things, creating a custom Kanban board within BB has been great as a replacement for Fizzy. (Thanks to you for that experience/experiment as well.)
Your custom plugin line lands on the same test I wrote about: bb put the conversation, the work, and the steering in one place. A Kanban inside that workspace sounds closer to that than a separate board I have to remember to visit.
So, how do you track projects, roadmaps, tickets.. .nowadays? :)
Are you still using TickTick next to it/ integrated to it? I have created my own version of front end for TickTick =sort by last added and fuzzy search.
But of course, TickTick is just well designed trash-bin for tasks and ideas. It has no relevant layer for higher level of project management. Do you have it now in bb?
So once again, Pawel, you're paving the way for us. Over the last 10 months or so I've dabbled and tried the various terminal interfaces. I tested similar options, but I ended up staying with plain ol' macOS Terminal. I have tmux running, which is good news at times and bad news at others (so many embedded key combos to remember). But I need a consistent way to access my M4 remotely. So I have endured for now. I have tried Deepsea DSH (harness), and despite the fact that it's new, real new (alpha), it's promising but ... not really a full replacement option.
So today I downloaded BB.
You're right - it just, well, works.
PS - I am looking over my shoulder at Omarchy on Linux. but the Linux box I was using just sorted pooped out on me. It was elderly so, I get it. But still, I cut my teeth originally on Linux and I grok the use of better security tools on Linux along with the flexibility and performance. So, I'll be looking at getting a used PC of some sort this fall to get that going.
"A board you have to remember to visit is a board that lies" earns the whole post. Every tracking system I've abandoned died the same way. Tracking was a second action, and second actions don't survive a busy week.
One push back on the ending. You count migration as cheap because the hours are cheap now, and they are. The tax I keep paying is different. After each move I spend a week not knowing where anything lives, and my judgment gets worse in that week without me noticing.
Nine surfaces in ten months is real learning. It's also nine of those weeks. The test isn't whether bb beats cmux. It's whether you're still in it in March, having stopped looking.
Thanks for this, bb has been great. What do you think about Orca as a alternative? Seems a lot more fleshed out.
Haven't given Orca a proper run yet, so I can't compare it fairly. What keeps me on bb is that my own agent can drive it from the CLI: spawn threads, steer them, read their output, while everything runs on my Mac Mini. That's the first thing I'd check in any alternative. If you try both, I'd love to hear how it goes.
Thanks for the response and all that you do; you are number one on Substack for me.
I stopped setting up Orca halfway through, just because it lacks the wiring for custom plugins like BB (I'll be keeping an eye on when it adds that), which just feels like an absolute requirement now after getting a taste for it. Among other things, creating a custom Kanban board within BB has been great as a replacement for Fizzy. (Thanks to you for that experience/experiment as well.)
Your custom plugin line lands on the same test I wrote about: bb put the conversation, the work, and the steering in one place. A Kanban inside that workspace sounds closer to that than a separate board I have to remember to visit.
So, how do you track projects, roadmaps, tickets.. .nowadays? :)
Are you still using TickTick next to it/ integrated to it? I have created my own version of front end for TickTick =sort by last added and fuzzy search.
But of course, TickTick is just well designed trash-bin for tasks and ideas. It has no relevant layer for higher level of project management. Do you have it now in bb?
Keep us posted on your use of 'bb'
So once again, Pawel, you're paving the way for us. Over the last 10 months or so I've dabbled and tried the various terminal interfaces. I tested similar options, but I ended up staying with plain ol' macOS Terminal. I have tmux running, which is good news at times and bad news at others (so many embedded key combos to remember). But I need a consistent way to access my M4 remotely. So I have endured for now. I have tried Deepsea DSH (harness), and despite the fact that it's new, real new (alpha), it's promising but ... not really a full replacement option.
So today I downloaded BB.
You're right - it just, well, works.
PS - I am looking over my shoulder at Omarchy on Linux. but the Linux box I was using just sorted pooped out on me. It was elderly so, I get it. But still, I cut my teeth originally on Linux and I grok the use of better security tools on Linux along with the flexibility and performance. So, I'll be looking at getting a used PC of some sort this fall to get that going.
Thank you
"A board you have to remember to visit is a board that lies" earns the whole post. Every tracking system I've abandoned died the same way. Tracking was a second action, and second actions don't survive a busy week.
One push back on the ending. You count migration as cheap because the hours are cheap now, and they are. The tax I keep paying is different. After each move I spend a week not knowing where anything lives, and my judgment gets worse in that week without me noticing.
Nine surfaces in ten months is real learning. It's also nine of those weeks. The test isn't whether bb beats cmux. It's whether you're still in it in March, having stopped looking.